New Album Amplifies Vanderslice's Music

Come May, when John Vanderslice releases his seventh full-length album, "Romanian Names," fans will hear only 12 of the 24 songs considered for the album.

The San Francisco singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist doesn't usually juggle so many tracks, but in this case, he's glad he did.

"Having that many songs to work with at once, I think, is great, because it discourages fidgeting with the material," Vanderslice says from his recording studio, Tiny Telephone, days before starting a tour that stops Tuesday in Northampton. "It's too overwhelming," he adds. "You really kind of decide what a song is going to do and follow it through."

The speedy approach was in keeping with Vanderslice's desire to make an album less "baroque and detailed" than his last, 2007's "Emerald City."

That collection, which featured cryptic lyrics about 9/11 and the Iraq war, centered on intricate arrangements and odd instrumentation.

"One thing I wanted to do is cut the songs lengths in half and double the tempos," he says of his forthcoming album. "That was my general model: to compress the form of all the songs and to accelerate and amplify them."

Lyrically, Vanderslice is no longer hung up on foreboding images of minarets and burning towers. "Romanian Names" is a more personal record, one that deals with "displaced people in end stages of relationships."

While Vanderslice himself isn't part of any lonely-hearts club - he's happily married - he suspects the shift away from political songwriting had to do with optimism leading up to November's election. "I think definitely when it became clear [Sen. John] McCain was going to be roughed up and lose big time, a lot of anger I had, and a lot of people had, was dissipating," he says. "I found myself writing about different stuff, and I found myself listening to different stuff."

Even if Vanderslice could say for sure what inspired his latest batch of songs, he's not sure he'd want to. Doing so would deny fans their interpretations.

"Art is not a passive thing," he says. "As a listener - and I believe this, any listener to any album - you're bringing at least half into the relationship, as far as connections."